By Isha Qarsoon

A previous essay in this series concluded that neither the international community nor Somalis have a theory for what comes after federalism. That conclusion was accurate: the death of federalism was not announced, and its replacement was not named. Underneath the death of federalism is a governance psychology that was always running beneath the federalism project and that makes the events of March 2026 not a rupture but the return of a system familiar to every Somali who lived through the decades before the collapse. T

hat system is the powerful center and the all-powerful president, resources flowing outward from Mogadishu through loyalty networks, institutions distributing positions rather than delivering services, whoever holds the presidency holding the state. That template predates Siad Barre. Barre perfected it, ran it for twenty-one years, and destroyed the country with it. When the state collapsed in 1991, the political class did not repudiate the template. It fought over who would inherit it. The civil war was not a rejection of centralism. It was a competition for it.

Federalism as Lipservice

Federalism was never chosen by the dominant political class as a governance philosophy. The political class gave it lip-service: enough conferences, enough constitutions, enough FMS formation processes to keep the funding flowing, without ever building the fiscal transfers, the electoral autonomy, or the genuine power-sharing that would have made it real. The IC funded the performance and called it state-building. This is why federalism was always dying. It was a transplant the body was built to reject. The template, the all-powerful president, the patronage state, the center that administers rather than shares, never stopped running underneath it. Federalism lasted as long as it was useful. When it became a constraint, HSM discarded it. Baidoa is where it ended.

There is a deeper failure here that the public record does not name. The international community’s theory was that federalism would protect weaker communities from the predatory centralism that produced the collapse. Distribute power, guarantee regional autonomy, prevent any single group from using the state apparatus against everyone else. The communities the IC was trying to protect were precisely those with no path to controlling the center: minority clans, inter-riverine communities, groups without the guns or the numbers to compete for the presidency.

Who Federalism Was Actually For

There is one community in Somalia’s history that understood federalism as a survival mechanism: the Digil and Mirifle, the inter-riverine agro-pastoralists who inhabit the territory between the Jubba and Shabelle rivers and speak Maay. Before independence, their political party, the Hisbia Dighil Mirifle, was the only major Somali political organization to formally advocate for a federal state. Their reason was explicit: fear of domination by the pastoralist clans that controlled the nationalist movement. They understood that in a unitary state, the presidency and the army would belong to whichever dominant group won the competition for the center, and the Digil and Mirifle would receive whatever that group chose to leave on the table. Their support for the 4.5 formula after the collapse followed the same logic: a fixed structural guarantee when the alternative is dependence on the goodwill of those who control the center. Both positions, separated by decades, are the same calculation. Without arithmetic protection, they are exposed.

Baidoa is their capital. Southwest State is their federal member state. The army that entered on March 30 was sent by a president from Mogadishu, backed by Turkish drones, to remove a Digil and Mirifle regional government. The deputy prime minister is now administering their state from Mogadishu by executive decree. The likely installed president is a ports minister aligned with Turkey. The deepest irony of Baidoa is this: the only people in Somali history who advocated for federalism before independence for reasons that had nothing to do with donor funding are the community whose state was just seized by federal force. The people who never believed in federalism are dismantling it. The people who always did are helplessly watching.

For Somalis more broadly, the president will still be all-powerful. Resources will still flow through loyalty networks. Institutions will still distribute positions rather than deliver services. The federal name will serve to extract international funding while the architecture is administered from the center. The Galmudug and Hirshabelle elections will be managed from Mogadishu and called democratic. The communities that have no guns, no external patron, and no structural guarantee will receive what the center chooses to give them. The IC spent twenty-five years and billions of dollars building a federal system that the dominant elites used as a vehicle when it was convenient and discarded when it became a constraint. It protected no one it was designed to protect. It funded a performance that served the performers.

The Theory in Action

The evidence that the new governance theory was prepared rather than improvised is in the timing. On March 23, while Laftagareen’s government still stood, the Interior Ministry asserted federal oversight of Southwest’s local administrations. On March 25, five days before a single soldier entered Baidoa, the Interior Minister appointed a new governor for Bakool Region and district commissioners for Hudur and Waajid by decree. These were parallel appointments, a shadow administration installed over a functioning regional authority.

The army entered on March 30. By April 1, the Prime Minister had appointed his Second Deputy as interim leader of Southwest State by executive decree. The transition structure was ready before the military outcome was decided. Galmudug and Hirshabelle require no army. Their presidents are clients surviving beyond their mandates on Mogadishu’s tolerance. Puntland and Jubaland are beyond the template’s reach. They have guns, geography, and external backers. Baidoa writes the permanent lesson: without military capacity, constitutional arguments are decoration.

The External Actors

When the federal army entered Baidoa, Ethiopian troops were already there, holding the airport and the presidential palace as part of AUSSOM. Ethiopia had reinforced as the crisis developed and had a prior working relationship with Laftagareen’s administration. When the federal army moved in, Ethiopian forces stood aside. Federal forces were instructed to avoid the airport and palace, deconflicting with Ethiopian positions while taking everything else. Why Ethiopia chose to stand aside is not fully clear. It may prefer weak regions administered from a center it can influence over autonomous states capable of cultivating independent relationships with powers like Egypt or the UAE along its border. What is clear is that Ethiopia had the capacity to raise the cost of the operation and chose not to. It kept the airport. The rest it left to Mogadishu.

Turkey was an active participant on the federal side, providing air support that cleared the approach to Baidoa. Turkey holds economic arrangements with the FGS covering offshore oil and the blue economy under agreements never subjected to parliamentary oversight. The figure HSM is reportedly seeking to install as Southwest State’s new president is the Ports Minister, Abdulkadir Mohamed Nur, known as the TikTok minister for his social media presence and frequent visits to Ankara. Installing a ports minister aligned with Turkey as president of the state between Mogadishu and the Jubaland coast is the Turkish resource interest acquiring a regional address.

In January 2026, HSM cancelled all agreements with the UAE after Abu Dhabi used Somali territory to extract a Yemeni separatist leader. Puntland and Jubaland rejected the cancellation. The UAE now operates exclusively through the outer tier, leaving Mogadishu to Turkey and Egypt.

The rest of the international community produced the expected. The UN called for dialogue. The African Union called for reconciliation. IGAD called for restraint. The EU said nothing distinct. The UK was indistinguishable from the multilateral default. None of it was a position. It was the institutional language of organizations whose Somalia engagement assumes the federal state they fund is the legitimate governance framework. Baidoa forced a contradiction they cannot resolve, so they issued statements and moved on.

The United States was the exception. On April 2, the State Department revoked A-2 diplomatic, B-1, and B-2 visas held by senior officials in the Offices of the President and Prime Minister, the Speaker of the House of the People, and Finance and Central Bank officials scheduled for the World Bank Spring Meetings on April 13 to 18. A-2 diplomatic visas were carved out of the Trump travel ban on Somali nationals, making their revocation a separate, targeted decision. Washington chose these officials deliberately. The action carries no alternative framework and no suspension of aid. It marks that Baidoa changed the terms of the relationship without stating what the new terms are.

Ethiopia accommodated the operation. Turkey enabled it. Multilateral institutions issued statements. The EU and UK said nothing of consequence. The United States registered displeasure while continuing to fund the institutions that executed it. Ethiopia wants a Somalia that cannot threaten it. Turkey wants Somalia’s resources under central control. The multilateral institutions want the federal framework they have funded to appear functional. The United States wants a stable partner in counterterrorism it can defend to Congress and its international partners. Baidoa was compatible with every external position except that of the United States. But the visa revocations are just a reminder, not a veto.

The theory now operating in the open is not a response to failed federalism. It is the return of a template that never left, the same centralist instinct that produced the Barre state, that survived the collapse as the animating drive of every faction that competed for power, and that wore the federalism costume for twenty-five years because the international community required performance. The costume is off. The federal flag will fly over Baidoa. Ethiopia will keep its troops at the airport. Turkey will pursue its economic interests through whoever runs Southwest State from the office the federal army delivered on March 30. The theory will remain unnamed, because the moment it acquires a name it requires a defense, and no defense exists that does not begin with what was always true: federalism in Somalia was a transplant the body was built to reject. The IC funded the performance. Somali leaders delivered it. Baidoa is where the performance ended.

What Comes Next: Fragmentation

The centralization project carries a fragmentation logic its authors have not accounted for. Puntland and Jubaland stayed inside the federal framework because the framework gave them something: recognition, constitutional standing, a seat at the table. The framework being built now gives them none of that. It is a unitary system they did not participate in creating, that they explicitly rejected, and that has demonstrated through Baidoa that the center will use force against those who resist and cannot defend themselves. Puntland and Jubaland can defend themselves. Their rational calculation is not to accept Mogadishu’s authority but to deepen their distance from it.

If they formalize that separation, what remains of the federal framework is Mogadishu administering the inner tier and calling it Somalia. The Digil and Mirifle, watching their state run by executive decree while Puntland and Jubaland operate as de facto independent entities with their own revenues and external relationships, face a version of the question their ancestors tried to answer in 1955. The answer their ancestors gave was a region of their own with structural protection. That answer becomes more attractive, not less, when the alternative is permanent administration from Mogadishu.

Somaliland benefits from every step of this. Each fragmentation episode makes its recognition case stronger. If Mogadishu attempts to recapture Jubaland or Puntland militarily and it becomes bloody, the contrast with Somaliland’s decades of stability becomes impossible for the international community to ignore. The argument that Somalia is a viable state collapses in real time.

North East State, the newly recognized member state feuding with both Puntland and Somaliland over contested northern territory, is the most exposed piece in this picture. Mogadishu’s practical access to it depends on Puntland’s cooperation — either use of Bosaso airport or overflight tolerance. If that cooperation is withdrawn, which Puntland has every incentive to do as relations deteriorate, North East State becomes effectively unreachable by the government that created it. Mogadishu will have recognized a state it cannot service.

The centralization project was supposed to consolidate Somalia. It may instead have set in motion the conditions for its final disaggregation — not through war necessarily, but through the steady withdrawal of every actor with the capacity to resist a framework that no longer offers them anything worth staying for.

Governance Paradox

The governance paradox that results from centralization clothed in federalism runs deeper than fragmentation. The federal parliament is constituted through the 4.5 clan formula, which seats clan delegates regardless of whether their home regions accept federal authority. Delegates from communities in Somaliland, Puntland, and Jubaland sit in Mogadishu while their regions operate outside the framework. The delegates will not leave because Mogadishu is where the resources are, where patronage flows, where presence translates into access. Their constituents may not be governed by Mogadishu but being inside the system that distributes what the IC funds is what governance in Somalia is all about. Fragmentation, for these delegates, is not a problem. It is an advantage. When their home region is outside the framework, there is no regional government or local elite competing for the same Mogadishu appointments. The Somaliland delegates collect the spoils of a system their own government rejects, with no one to answer to.

Mogadishu residents face the other side. As the outer tier withdraws, the capital becomes the most directly administered, most directly taxed, and most directly subject to whoever controls the presidency, with nothing left to constrain that control. The parliament grows less representative while the executive grows more concentrated. The city that is supposed to govern Somalia ends up its most captured territory.

What emerges is not a consolidated government. It is a patronage network with a federal name, sustained by delegates from places it cannot reach, strangling the capital it controls, and collecting international funding for institutions that serve none of the purposes they were built to serve. The IC can reduce its funding. What it cannot do is call the system by its real name, because doing so means either accepting that Somalia has fragmented or admitting that the federal project it financed was captured from within. Neither conclusion is available to an institution that must justify its own existence. So it stays, funds, and files reports. Fraud continues because acknowledging it is the one thing no one can afford.

Isha Qarsoon
Email:  Ishaqarsoon1@gmail.com
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